Increasing Magento Mobile Friendliness

In 2014 it was found that use of mobiles overtook desktop devices. With Black Friday, Thanksgiving AND Cyber Monday drawing close, you definitely want to optimize your Magento store to be as mobile friendly as possible. These holidays are possibly the biggest opportunities to make a lot of conversions happen so businesses don’t want to be missing out on all the possible sales. You may be thinking “why is this sod talking about these holidays when they’re still a few weeks away”, well it’s good to leave some time to fix any bugs that may arise whilst making changes to your store!

Why does my site need to be mobile optimised site?

Google will rank your site higher than others for simply being mobile friendly.

As seen in the picture above you get the “mobile friendly” label just underneath the url of your site.

You may even drop rankings for not being mobile friendly.

With that in mind, the following are 5 good tips to make sure your Magento store is ready to sell for these money making holidays:

Optimize text:

Believe it or not, site users will actually leave your site just because of the simple fact they can’t read the text. I’ve done it on a few occasions (and I’m sure many of you have too), so there’s nothing stopping other people from doing the same. Make your text readable without having to zoom and it will make a good difference.

No horizontal scrolling:

Create landing pages which can be viewed without having to scroll horizontally on mobile devices. It is beyond annoying and will not only drive people away from your site but may also prevent users from returning.

Avoid putting up unplayable content:

Sometimes browsers restrict people from watching for videos on your website. This could be for one of many reasons such as;

Content requires Flash to play.

Requires an uncommon player to be installed.

Browser not able to play license-restricted content.

Use Modules:

One of the preferred ways for creating a Magento site is through modules. There are plenty that are already on the market, with new modules coming out on a regular basis. An example of one of these themes is “Shopgate”. It works by converting your desktop website into an optimised one. The whole process isn’t very long and everything is automatic. You do have to pay for this extension however there is also a 14 day free trial to see whether or not it is for you! It has a rating of 3.9 on Magento Connect with some users saying it was a miracle plug-in to others saying it doesn’t work.

PLEASE NOTE: This is not a recommendation for Shopgate, just an example of one of many plug-ins that can be used to convert your store into a mobile optimised one!

Page speed:

The whole of my latest articlewas about page speed, I just thought I’d go over it AGAIN just to emphasise my point about how important it is. With e-commerce giants like Amazon and eBay around, it can be very easy to lose sales to them over small things like site speed. If your site is taking too long to load, expect this. For more an in-depth look at page speed and what to avoid, read my latest article here.

Just like the Google page speed tester, there is also a Google program which tells you the errors of your site in terms of it being optimised for mobile use or not. You can check that out here.Other than this, make sure you have an awesome Monday! 🙂